


A New Heart

by Dipenates



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Gen, General, Spiritual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-15
Updated: 2009-11-15
Packaged: 2017-10-02 19:58:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dipenates/pseuds/Dipenates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why does Don decide to explore his faith?</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Heart

The FBI office smelt of office supplies; of industrial carpeting and computers on every desk. Of bad coffee and cheap cleaning products. Of the mixed colognes of a hundred spiffy agents.

Shul smelt of old books; the delicate scent of knowledge and wisdom sharp in Don's nostrils. The air seemed richer, thicker here. Laden with portent and thousands of years of ritual.

The peace wasn't the absence of noise as much as a real presence. An indefinable entity that was both old and fresh, stilling Don's thoughts and smoothing them like a mother's hand on a fevered brow.

He couldn't remember when he started coming here, but he could remember why.

Don was average. Physically solid, but not as built as Colby or David. Smart, but not as smart as Megan and definitely not anywhere near Charlie's mercurial brilliance. A good son, but someone who had kicked his enthusiastic puppy of a brother; resenting the attention and thought that his parents poured in to the challenge of _what to do with Charlie. _A decent agent, but one who was becoming inexorably hardened with exposure to the damage that people do both to one another and to the fragile fabric of society.

He was average. Not even as _good _as average when he had that tugging sense of disappointment that he hadn't taken the steroids that could have propelled him to the Majors. Or the hard shards of resentment lodged in the middle of the love he felt for his brother.

And so he sat in shul.

ונתתי לכם ל' ח"ש ורוח ח"ש" אתן 'קר'כם ו"סרתי את־ל' "א'ן

מ'שרכם ונתתי לכם ל' 'שר

_Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh._

Don believed that buildings absorbed something from the events that had taken place inside them. He'd removed children from basements that had evil still clinging to their walls. The house that Charlie had bought was full of the liturgy of daily life, but the dust in the nooks and crannies also held the tension that Charlie's genius had wrought and the fracturing of their family that had had to take place to accommodate it.

The FBI office had responsibility and obedience curled into every corner.

Shul held something indescribable. As Don sat in the near silence, hearing the distant sounds of the shul choir practicing _Ein Kelokeinu,_ he felt something inside himself shift and the world fell away. He wasn't sure that he even had the language to pray, to express the desire to be more than he was, but the silence and the presence was somehow enough.

He left, blinking, into the California sunlight and felt, not for the first time, how strange it was that his recent interest in his faith had separated him from the people around him as much as it connected him to himself and to the world. He had been afraid of what Charlie would say; had almost anticipated the look of condescension in Charlie's brown eyes as he scrupulously outlined why Don was stupid to have faith. That hadn't happened and Don had felt a rush of relief that Charlie just seemed mildly interested in his discussions with the Rabbi.

But then Charlie had come home one day with a stack of books and started talking over dinner about Hebrew and numbers and letters and textual analysis and patterns and algorithms, all in the tone he used when he was lecturing to his classes. And their father had been encouraging, because he was always encouraging. And Don felt the bitter sting of jealousy; of wanting, irrationally, to be the one who was good at this and not Charlie. But how could you be good at God, and what did it say about him that he wanted that?

ונתתי לכם ל' ח"ש ורוח ח"ש" אתן 'קר'כם ו"סרתי את־ל' "א'ן

מ'שרכם ונתתי לכם ל' 'שר

_Moreover, I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh._

And so he sat in shul.


End file.
